Posted
by
timothy
on Friday June 20, 2014 @05:45PM
from the can't-sharpen-the-sea dept.

An anonymous reader writes So I, like many people, want to make my own game. Outside of MATLAB, Visual Basic, and LabVIEW I have no real programming experience. I initially started with Ruby, but after doing my homework decided that if I ever wanted to progress to a game that required some power, I would basically need to learn some form of C anyway. Further digging has led me to C#. The other parts of game design and theory I have covered: I have ~8 years of CAD modeling experience including Maya and Blender; I have a semiprofessional sound studio, an idie album on iTunes, and am adept at creating sound effects/music in a wide variety of programs; I'm familiar with the setbacks and frustration involved with game development — I beta tested DotA for 9ish years; I already have my game idea down on paper (RTS), including growth tables, unit types, unit states, story-lines, etc. I've been planning this out for a year or two; I will be doing this on my own time, by myself, and am prepared for it to take a couple years to finish. The reason for listing that stuff out, is that I want people to understand that I know what I'm getting myself in to, and I'm not trying to put out a not-so-subtle "help me make a game for free lol" type of post. With all of that said, where is a good place to start (i.e., recommended books) for learning C# for game programming? I am familiar with object oriented programming, so that's a little bit of help. I'm not necessarily looking for the syntax (that part is just memorization), but more for the methodology involved. If anyone also has any suggestions for other books or information that deal with game development, I would love to hear that too. I know enough to understand that I really don't know anything, but have a good foundation to build on.

I disagree. spend a little time to think about your path then dive in. example, I needed to pick up a language for simple scripts, choosing between php and python. PHP was simple to install through an XAMPP php/apache/PHP package. so i just dived in and did it.

retrospect, I wish I had invested in python instead. Now that I can use PHP I'll just make scripts there, but python could have been so much more potential for other work.

that being said, I recommend swift, apple's new language for iOS apps. It's go

Have you actually been using swift. Nice concept, buggy as hell implementation. Sure it's beta, but in my opinion it's too buggy even for beta release. and lack of support for fixed arrays in my opinion is strange...

Start simple - very simple. Try breakout, tetris, a board game, etc, then start adding features to learn about those features. Then make the game you really want to do in the same approach - minimum viable product, then flesh it out like stone soup. When the soup's done, ship it!

This.

Except, start with what you know. If you're good at audio, start by writing a program that can receive and handle requests to play sounds. Now, in a complex game like an RTS the sound effects will need to overlap. So for instance in a space-based RTS the roar of a rocket launch may need to overlap with multiple bangs och zaps of plasma rifles and lasers. Once you have a sound program that works well enough you can call that your sound engine.

Also sign up at Coursera [coursera.org]. They have a course titled "Beginning Game Programming with C#" taught by the University of Colorado. The course also teaches basic C# syntax, so it's very beginner friendly. You just have to wait for it to be offered again before signing up.

If you really want to code games, stick to what most people in the industry use - C++.

While I agree with you, because C# is too high-level for game programming, Microsoft just released a native C# compiler:http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-U... [microsoft.com]This should provide performance almost equivalent to C++.

you miss the point - its not about performance (though I think the native C++ compiler for C# code shows that Microsoft has stopped willy waving between their divisions and are actually going for stuff that works - performance will still be worse, all that GC going on means C# code tends to be less performant due to the way the language works. A C+ program that allocates and copies memory all the time would be slow too)

Anyway, its the fact that everyone else does it in C++ that matters. A bit like writing

There are a number of commercial indie games on platforms ranging from Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, the PS3, the PS4, the XBox 360, the Wii, the Wii U and the XBox One written using C# executing via Unity or Mono using something like MonoGame.

C# is not too high level for game programming, it's perfectly adequate. You may start running into issues with it if you're trying to produce photorealistic next gen console graphics with it, but I assure you, if you're an indie developer, you are not doing this, becaus

Not every game needs to be super CPU-intensive though; Hearthstone is created in Unity3D, for example, and that works super well on everything but an iPad2. Skipping C++ initially and learning to create a game in Unity3D with C# is probably a wise choice for a bunch of people, at least for prototyping and for a wide variety of games that aren't CPU-limited.

Warning: this is blatantly self-promotional. It's also a pretty good answer to the question, I think, so hopefully I won't get violently modded down.

It sounds like you're exactly who Jenny Greene and I wrote Head First C# [oreilly.com] for. I played around with a lot of different ways to teach both C# language and core object oriented programming and computer science concepts, and I found that building games was easily the most satisfying way to do it.

The only way to really learn a language is writing a lot of code, and one of the biggest challenges I had putting the book together was coming up with many different projects. The answer was games: a card games, a turn-based game, arcade games -- it turns out that building a game is a great way to keep readers motivated, especially when they're learning new concepts. I've had a lot of really positive feedback from first-time programmers who found it really satisfying to get through the book, and especially building the final project (a retro Space Invaders game).

Why C#? Develop your game in C++ using OpenGL ES for rendering. Your code will compile as-is for iOS, Android, Windows, OSX, and others. You will only need a couple hundred lines of native code (java for Android, Objective C for iOS, etc) to handle events and pass execution into your C++ code. My game engine runs on all the above platforms and 99.9% of my code is shared across all of them.

Also, these days many, many developers simply use an existing game engine and only bother with the high level code specific to their game. Mundane stuff like the low level rendering, Audio APIs (which unlike OpenGL ES, differ quite a bit from one platform to another), physics, etc, is ground that's been treaded several thousand times nowadays, and most game developers leave that stuff to the experts in the various fields to handle the nitty gritty. Optimization of those routines is usually where the "expert" part comes into play.

I work with a game designer / artist who implements all the high level game stuff in Lua, and my engine takes care of all the aforementioned "boring" stuff, freeing him up to actually develop games, and not worry about crap like polygon tessellation algorithms and tons of other very boring stuff that would just be a waste of his time.

You start out saying that you have no real programming experience, but at the end say that you feel like you have a good foundation to build on. I think that is a contradiction. Serious game development benefits tremendously from a deep knowledge of computer science, and you are likely to struggle to accomplish much without a solid foundation in programming.

With that said, I suggest you download Unity3D and play around with it. You can do a lot purely visually, and knock yourself out with as much C# scr

Yep,Unity - you would be surprised how many commercial games are using it. Several new independent titles like Wasteland 2, Torment: Tides of Numenera, Castle Story, Kerbal Space Program. Runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android. I also heard that over 50% of the mobile games are using unity (check out "The Room" and "Temple Run" for examples). The scripting language is C#. The workflow is tailored to the visual assets, so it is perfect for someone with your background. The unity engine does a lot of

To reinforce this: Building your own engine is a great way to fall into a trap that you won't escape for years if not decades. If you're interested in building a game, then you should build a game, and use the toolchain that lets you get to your game as quickly as possible. Right now that's a race between Unity and Unreal Engine 4, and while neither one has perfect support, I'd say the userbase for Unity is sufficiently deep that it's a better starting point. Don't worry, you'll still get plenty of opportunity to code (and to learn C# - another reason to go with Unity over UE4, if that's the language you really want), but there'll be enough that you don't have to code that you can focus on the fundamentals of building your game.

Forget C#. Start with Haskell and get a PHD in category theory and applied mathematics. Then study GHC internals for several years in order to figure out how to make Haskell fast enough for anything non trivial. Only approach game development once you have a solid understanding of GHC internals, endofunctors, lenses, monoids, monads, comonads, cofree, cofree comands, synergistic cold fusion, rankntypes, multi parameter typeclasses, string theory, functional dependencies, synthesized kinetic energy, generalized new type deriving, existential quantification, existential crisis, scoped type variables, GADTs, the space time continuum and have solved the halting problem. Also reimplement the entire standard library because the current one is terrible and horribly inefficient.

Either that or pick up any of the few dozen C++, C# or Python game development books and start reading.

I wondered a bit recently about "game programming" and what that really means. This morning on a radio show about maker fairs, one person said her young daughter was on a one or two week game programming camp. It really dawned on me that game programming just does not mean what I think it means. But guess is that the kids must be using pre-build gaming platforms and then scripting on top of it. Similar for the weekend hackathons, they can not possibly be writing a game from scratch, they don't have time

It really dawned on me that game programming just does not mean what I think it means.

Do you think it means AAA FPGs and RPSes? The vast majority of games are much smaller scale than that.

It's possible that the game programming camp is setting the children up with a point-and-click game dev engine (although I hope not); but it might well be giving them a framework like PyGame and a lot of help to get a couple of simple 2D games running. If it fosters the kind of experiences that my generation had growing up

It's possible that the game programming camp is setting the children up with a point-and-click game dev engine

There's no better point-and-click game dev engine for learning than Scratch; if that's what they used, expect the kids coming out to have learned some of the logical skills involved in computer science. Syntax is easy if you've already got a good grasp on splitting up complicated problems into smaller ones, breaking smaller problems down to math and logic structures, and integrating many smaller com

When I wrote that line, what I really had in mind was a specific platformer-creation tool which was responsible for a rash of crappy games on Kongregate a few years ago, but I couldn't (and still can't) remember the name.

I love C#. I program in it every day. It's plenty fast, and it's a great language.

However, there are two reasons I would suggest looking to another language.

First, the hottest market for gaming right now is mobile. While it's possible to compile C# for iPhone or Android using Xamarin (along with Windows and OS X), it's not exactly a native experience.

Second, C# (like O-C, C++, etc.) is a general programming language -- it's not in any way specific to the domain of game programming. So, while it's *possible* to design complex games in any modern language, you're probably going to spend *way* too much time dealing with silly stuff like tracking graphics resources and animation loops and simulated physics. You'll have a higher chance of success if you use a language and platform that is more game-specific out of the box.

I would suggest looking into Swift -- it'll give you access to the lucrative iOS market, it's C-like, and it has features that are game-specific. Sure, it's a new language it doesn't compile to Android, but by all accounts it looks like a great language with first-class support for gaming, so you can focus less on infrastructure code and more on the game.

Another option would be HTML5. Depending what sort of game you're looking to build, Javascript and HTML5 may be just the ticket, and there are a number of libraries that can abstract away browser differences and assist with the plumbing needed to make a game run.

Pick an engine you want to use first, then pick a language to learn that is used by that engine. Very few games now are written purely in a native language with no supporting engine, so pick a modern game engine that will do a lot of the hard, low level work for you. Then, learn the language that is used for interacting with the desired engine. For example, if you wanted to use the Unity engine, then you would basic learn C#. If you wanted to use CryENGINE, then you would learn C++ and Lua scripting. If you

The best way is to make games first, then see what language do you need later. Most games do not even need something such as C# and what might seem as " more powerful" can also be seem as "more wasted time doing something more complex than needed".

Then what are they built in? I've been wondering this because of a lot of stories and anecdotes about quickly built games, hackathons, etc. Is there some sort of "game builder" software that everyone uses, an update of RPGmaker that's actually useful, or...? Having been programming for 30+ years, I haven't seen any programming that is as easy as these hackathons or makerfaires seem to imply it is.

Surprisingly enough, there is. A lot of game developers use GameMaker to prototype games. But some of them are good enough to be published on Steam straight out of Gamemaker. And it's simple enough that my 11-yr old has been using it for his own game.

Disclaimer: my former prof built it.

There's also Unity3D.

These tools take away a lot of details that used to be 80% of the work, and leave you to work on the *game*, as opposed to rendering the screen without tearing or trying to get the audiobuffer to play without clipping, or... etc.

My advice, as a professional game developer, is "don't write code unless you need to."

If you must write C# you should take a look at Unity, but honestly you would be remiss if you overlooked Unreal 4. It is the newest version of the Unreal Engine, and it includes most of the most important features of a game; behavior trees, navigation, user interface, physically-based rendering, animation state machines, multiplayer replication, etc. You can do most of what you want to in Blueprint (a visual scripting language), and if you really need to, you can edit the source code (the license is a full-source license) and make what enhancements you need in C++.

Writing most of this shit from scratch will take you years, just get down to the actual MAKING of the game, and use someone else's engine. The terms are fair ($20/mo, 5% gross revenue for PC platforms and mobile), and the engine is extremely well curated.

Agreed. Writing a game is something that one enthusiastic developer can at least sensibly aspire to in their spare time, trying to build a game on top of a custom engine is something else entirely- the amount of rendering code, tools, integration, and other side tasks just pile up too quickly.

I think it's interesting that you know Visual Basic, but want to get into C#. My first question would be "Why?". Both run on the same framework and both are equally capable. All you're doing is learning new syntax to do things you already know how to do. After that question is the comment "You pretty much already know C#". Sure, it's a different language from VB, but that's the easy part. It uses the same tools and libraries, so you know 95% of it already.

Visual Basic went to.Net five versions ago. It was acceptable to take VB to mean classic VB in 2003, but in 2014, you have to say so if you mean the old stuff. The VB6 development environment doesn't even run on any supported operating system. VBA is still around, but it's always been incorrect to refer to VBA as VB.

The fact that you're not already coding and Ruby couldn't hold your interest makes me wonder exactly what you want to do and why.

If you plan to learn to code mainly as a necessary step towards creating your dream RTS then I hate to piss on your fireworks, but you're wasting your time. It's just way too much dang work and frustration for something you don't find interesting and exciting in and of itself.

If I got the wrong idea and you do find coding interesting, forget about the RTS for a while and just worr

The reason for listing that stuff out, is that I want people to understand that I know what I'm getting myself in to, and I'm not trying to put out a not-so-subtle "help me make a game for free lol" type of post

I'm sorry, but your long list of "I did this and that" means only that you are a gamer with a few artistic skills, it has absolutely no value for game programming !

During my 18 years of game programming, I met a lot of people that had "wonderful" ideas (it's funny how everybody has a dream game), but no skill to realize them.They always boasted about the fact that their idea was great, but their project never got released.

Writing a game requires the following skills:1) technical skill: coding2) art skill: graphics/animation and sound/music3) gameplay skill: making the game enjoyable4) story telling: making a coherent game's universeIn my life, I never met a single person with all of these skills, at a decent level.The most talented ones had only 2 skills.

Firstly, before coding your dream game, try to write a very simple game. It will show you where you'll need help.If you are a beginner, you won't be able to code Starcraft.Try something related to your project, so you can increase your knowledge.

Secondly, since most of the CPU power is spent on display and AI, you'll need to learn:1) how to optimize the display.Since the whole screen needs to be redrawn very frequently, you have to learn techniques to render fast.There are tons of techniques in 2D and 3D.2) AI algorithms, most notably path-finding algorithms if you want to program a RTS.

Thirdly, try to build a prototype in one month.If you are able to build it in one month, you'll probably be able to work on your project during several months.It will also show that you don't lose yourself on details (non-professionals tend to waste their time on small details, thus the final goal disappears).If you are unable to build it in one month, it means that your project is not well defined, probably too ambitious or completely unrealizable.

Fourthly, I would recommend to build a motivated team around your game.This is a virtuous circle: when your motivation will decrease, they'll encourage you and when they'll get demotivated, you'll encourage them.Nowadays, I believe that it's impossible to write a game alone, unless your game is very simple.Find people who believe in your project and who may help you.

I first want to say that I agree with much of what you've said, especially about starting small.But...Notch has shown us (yet again) that #3 is really the only one that matters.Early Minecraft was not well coded. It still doesn't have great graphics or sound (though I do like the music) and there really isn't much of a story.You don't even have to play the story part of the game to have hours and hours of fun and Mojang is doing quite well for themselves.

Notch is an exception, and I have a famous counterexample: Carmack/Romero.Romero focused on gameplay while Carmack focused on technics.When they split, Carmack continued to produce hits, while Romero had a lot less success.

What I wanted to say is that you'd better be excellent in a domain, but you cannot expect to succeed if you can't find people to address your weaknesses.

About Notch, he focused on a concept, like some rare authors. I met 2 of them in my life,

Actually I think Minecraft has excellent graphics, the pixel art is very well done. That's all it targets anyway, not realism or high-poly models. The sound deparment...well, it's mostly pretty good, but some of the monster grunts have somewhat "homebrew" characteristics to them.:)

I started by working with the Quake 3 engine and seeing what I could do to it. I wound up modifying the guns by adding new firing modes, modifying how the camera a little and learned how to add effects to the game.

Then I messed around with the trigger editor in Starcraft.

Then I messed around with the trigger editor in Warcraft 3 and made a lot more complex things, including implementing the character progression system from a single game from a popular Japanese RPG series -- which shall remain nameless

Other people have suggested how to learn the basics of a language, so I'll ignore that problem.

Designing and writing good code is an art form. There are many anti-patterns you may fall into that could doom your project that a more experienced developer can help you avoid.

A couple hours a week spent explaining your design before you start writing code, or helping to track down why your code doesn't work as expected, or reviewing the code you believe is finished, will save you days of wasted effort.

When you get something working, commit it. It's like the scientific method, if you can't reproduce something it doesn't exist. Source control gives you confidence to experiment, knowing that you can easily undo everything without losing something that you know works.

I'm 100% serious. I learned C# that way and wound up writing the application code for a product that sells for about 5 million a year.

Here is your task, since you're interested in making games. Make a game of pong in C#. Use Google to look up how to do it. Start with a hello world program. Then make a program with a form. Then figure out how to paint to it. Keep going.

At the end of the pong game you'll know enough to be dangerous. Good luck!

I've been thinking about this, as my daughter has asked me to teach her some programming, and quite honestly, the progression of games in real life is perfect.

Make pong. Make death race 2000. Make Asteroids. Make Space Invaders. Make Tetris. Make a platform jumper with static screens with transitions at the edges. Make a side-scrolling jumper. Keep working your way up.

Try Beginning Game Programming with C# [coursera.org] About the CourseThe Beginning Game Programming with C# course is all about learning how to develop video games using the C# programming language. Why use C# instead of C++, Java, ActionScript, or some other programming language you may have heard of? First, using C# lets us use the Microsoft XNA and open-source MonoGame frameworks, which help us quickly develop games for Windows, Android, iOS, Mac OS, and others. Second, the Unity game engine is very popular with in

I was thrown into the deep end with C# best way to learn it is to do it, that should be a no shit for anyone who has written in any language ever

programming a game however requires a totally different way of thinking about the problem at hand, and it doesnt matter the language, its the methodology of writing a game, just like writing a db app is different from writing a website

quit asking dumb questions, its a new to you language, do what you can and figure it out, god knows there's enough resources out the

If you really want to learn to program games, start with Lua instead of C# or C++. It's a tiny little scripting language that can be learnt in a few hours and is used by an enormous number of game development companies. Lua is often tasked with providing a UI for the game, logic flow, rapid prototyping of features, anything really except for the critical loops - which are all handled in C++.

Once you have Lua under your belt you should learn C++, because at the heart this is what all performance sensitive games are written in. The game engine will be a mess of tight, sometimes obscure C++. If you want to make changes that are at that level then you absolutely need to be able to write C++.

Finally, think about learning C# if it's supported by the game engine you have chosen to use for your game. It should perform about the same speed as the Lua code and it's used for the same tasks - game logic, etc.

Since you're a beginner, I'd recommend you go with either Unity or Unreal Engine as these are both easier to learn and have a lot more community support. Unreal Engine now comes with the complete source code in C++, so you can take a solid look under the hood and see what's happening in there. CryEngine is moving towards releasing more of their source code, but are not there yet.

Really your first question should be which language to learn, but which engine to learn. The engine will dictate which languages you need to learn from there.

You have a more important problem than which language to chose. The most striking thing about your post is it sounds like you have grand designs for a game (your first game) and that's a bad thing. What you are doing is what almost every new game developer attempts to do... or at least thinks about: going in too big, running before you can walk, building a supersonic jet before you've built your first paper plane etc etc...

Sure you have programming experience and sound design and 3D modeling experience. But

Hasn't anyone noticed that? Rithet there in the right up? C# is more like Java. Either that is a typo or the poster is clueless. So what what does the poster really want, a C# like language or a C/C++/Objective C type language?

So I, like many people, want to make my own game. Outside of MATLAB, Visual Basic, and LabVIEW I have no real programming experience. I initially started with Ruby, but after doing my homework decided that if I ever wanted to progress to a game that required some power, I would basically need to learn some form of C anyway. Further digging has led me to C#. The other parts of game design and theory I have covered: I have ~8 years of CAD modeling experience including Maya and Blender; I have a semiprofessional sound studio, an idie album on iTunes, and am adept at creating sound effects/music in a wide variety of programs; I'm familiar with the setbacks and frustration involved with game development — I beta tested DotA for 9ish years; I already have my game idea down on paper (RTS), including growth tables, unit types, unit states, story-lines, etc. I've been planning this out for a year or two; I will be doing this on my own time, by myself, and am prepared for it to take a couple years to finish

I don't have any gaming programming experience and a lot less programming experience than you do already.

You mentioned a lot of details but failed to mention if you'll be targeting a particular platform. For instance: will you release you game for sale/free? Is a mobile version ever a possibility? Will you release it for the "Windows Store"? Steam? Both? Neither? Is this just a hobbie no one else will ever see? A resume bullet point?

Anyway, speaking not as somebody who has done what your describing but

Which means, just as GP AC said, it's completely unsuitable for a "serious" game.

What OP needs to learn is C, or at a minimum C++. Nothing else will fly for this application. Rudimentary games can be done in other languages, but anything that really needs fancy graphics or fast processing will need C++ or C.

but anything that really needs fancy graphics or fast processing will need C++ or C.

Totally incorrect. Anything that needs fancy graphics just require an SDK with access to a fancy graphics processing engine. I've written games in Java that use OpenGL on the backend. You don't need the language to be C or C++ to access OpenGL. As far as fast processing requirements, I guarantee you most games don't actually need processing that would not be fast enough in bytecode but would be fast enough in native code.

There are a load of very detailed (fancy) 3D games using WebGL, not rudimentary at all.

Yes, and they are SLOW.

Crank them up to anything like a "decent, modern" FPS gaming (or even RPG gaming) resolution, and watch the framerate hit the floor.

Sure, it's getting faster. But you're missing the point. While WebGL and the like are getting ever faster, due almost entirely to better hardware, guess what? C++ or C are also getting faster at the same rate. Allowing better, faster, better resolution and more realistic games.

So he STILL needs to learn C or C++ if he's serious about writing game

Except for those people who had to target a platform that requires verifiably type-safe CIL that targets the.NET Compact Framework. Xbox Live Indie Games was this way, as was Windows Phone 7. Practically the only language that produces such bytecode is C#, as standard C++ as compiled by C++/CLI is not verifiably type-safe and IronPython requires Emit which isn't part of the Compact Framework.

the C++ code ran on a server instead of a desktop OS like C# requires.

Windows Server is a server operating system whose NT kernel is inspired by the architecture of Digital's VMS. It runs C# in the.NET Framework. FreeBSD is a server operating system. It has a port of Mono, a.NET Framework workalike, called BSD#.

I'm pretty sure the reason your payroll calculator written in C# was that slow had nothing to do with the.net framework and everything to do with something you failed to optimize in that version, but did optimize in the original Cobol version. Either that or you were running it on a way slower computer - a "desktop OS" rather than a "server", even though those terms are pretty meaningless and there should not be any reason you would have to run it on a desktop machine? Unless, of course, you're defining "server" as "machine that doesn't run Windows", in which case, that's pretty no-true-scotsman-like. You can make a plenty fast Windows server machine, then run headless, server-like C# programs on it.

Yes, obviously C# programs aren't going to be quite as fast as equivalent c++ programs - you *are* compiling C# code to bytecode and then running it through a virtual machine, so of course it'll be a little slower. But only a little. I doubt you could write a balls-to-the-wall Crysis-like shooter in C#, but I don't imagine there'd be any performance-related reason you couldn't write an RTS in C# and have it run just fine on any machine not so old that its OS wouldn't support the.net framework anyway.

C# doesn't 'run through a virtual machine' - CIL bytecode is 'always' JIT compiled to native machine code in both Microsoft's.net platform and in Mono.

The only overhead/problem here is quality of the JIT (you need only look as far as ECMA 262 to see how much difference that can make, eg: JaegerMonkey vs. V8), CIL JIT has type checking requirements - so there's once-off validation overhead for each JIT, and lastly unlike C/C++ your JIT compiler rarely has (or wants to have, due to memory and performance considerations) a complete view of the entire program - so you don't get anything remotely similar to link-time optimisations.

That said - for relatively flat code structures - well written C# will JIT into, in many cases, identical instructions to what GCC/Clang/MSVC will do for equivalent C/C++ code.

The primary differences are around exception handling and boxed types. Neither of which you're going to be using heavily in performance critical code segments in C# anyway - because all of them can be avoided with well written C# or some unsafe magic.

The performance reasoning may go away sometime soon. Microsoft has been working on a native compiler and has a preview for Windows Store apps. They've said they're bringing it to the full.NET platform. At which point you get all the performance of C++ with the benefits of a robust framework and a good language.

" I doubt you could write a balls-to-the-wall Crysis-like shooter in C#, but I don't imagine there'd be any performance-related reason you couldn't write an RTS in C# and have it run just fine on any machine not so old that its OS wouldn't support the.net framework anyway."

You might be surprised to discover you are completely wrong on this account. I'm currently write a game using the CryEngine 3. The code comes as a mix of C++, Lua and Flowgraph (a graphing system that allows rapid prototyping). There's a

Considering that he's a beginner: Badly optimized C++ code is slower than well optimized C# code. Or, in another way, if you're new to programming and optimization is the least of your problem (because getting that damn thing to compile and do what it is supposed to do is a much bigger one), it doesn't really matter that much...

One thing has to be said for C#, as much as I am a subscriber to the "If C is Play-Doh, and C++ is Lego - C# is Duplo" philosophy, it does allow to get results fast without having to

One thing has to be said for C#, as much as I am a subscriber to the "If C is Play-Doh, and C++ is Lego - C# is Duplo" philosophy, it does allow to get results fast without having to use a ton of libraries that in the end weigh you down more than C# would.

So in other words, C# gets results fast without having to weigh you down more than itself would?

I'm currently using C++ for developing an RPG, and I would recommend it over C#. I don't know much about C#, butI have coded in it a few small programs.
C++ is very well known in game development. I would recommend it and a framework such as SFML or SDL. Once you get more familiar with these, you can move onto learning Directx3D and OpenGL.
Learn about Game States (I just learned this the other day and it drastically makes management of game code so much easier), game timing, game loops, Isometric games, sprite-sheets and tiling. The latter two are important for 2D games and since you are building a RTS, It may be essential for you. I know you are not doing a RPG game, but a lot of the material can be used for an RTS.
I'm following a book called Programming Role Playing Games in Direct x, it's not for beginners, but it has valuable information on gaming algorithms for Enemy AI, Game States, Game loops, etc.
I would recommend checking out Coke and Code ( type that into Google ). I think the same person also released a Youtube RPG tutorial series.
3DBuzz has some tutorials, but some are paid. There C++ one also does a RPG game.
SFML Made Easy is another series on Youtube that is really good.
It wont be an easy task, just start small, take your time, and don't do too much at once. Start with just getting a character walking around on a screen ( this will require animation frames, so look that up ).
Understand the update() and render(), calls in a game loop.

C#'s speed depends on the coding style than on the language. If you know what you're doing, Microsoft.NET gets within 2x of C++ speed most of the time. Mono is substantially worse (have a look at these benchmarks [codeproject.com], which focus on simple programs that are written in a "C with classes" style.) If you are using features like LINQ (considered a "must-have" C# feature) you'll take a performance hit, but when you write C# code as if it were C code then its performance isn't far from C. Luckily you don't have to w

I use unity. Like you say, if you make more than $100K per year, then you need to buy pro.

But really, who cares? $1500 - $4500 (depending on what you need) is a very reasonable price for the tool, and an insignificant cost at that point. The cost of writing games is orders of magnitude higher than that, and Unity will end up saving you more in time than $4500 worth of programmer's time. They don't even charge royalty.

Also, why a trap? The terms are clear and you know them up front. Nobody is deceiving you into paying for something you did not want. From my point of view, the terms are quite generous and reasonable, and if you don't think so, then you simply use other tool and this does not affect you

If you have to pay $4500 because you are making $100K/year , it is a very nice problem to have:).

Three of us took that "Beginning Game Programming with C#" Coursera course. Two of us were professional programmers (myself a professional game developer) so we blew through the course; our third was a gaming buddy who wanted to try out programming -- he was an excellent gamer but had never done any programming. (Back in the day he had done a little shell scripting on Windows.)

The coursera is NOT a beginner friendly course -- it had two major problems:

My buddy dropped out after a few weeks because he just felt completely lost. We would spend hours going over concepts with him and he would get most of it. But when it came to the assignments he didn't have enough of the big picture and low level details to reason things out. IMHO there are better lessons out there, such as:

Microsoft are no longer actively developing XNA, and haven't been for quite some time now [extremetech.com]. Better to go with something which is going to support the systems which will be available when your development's finished.

I already know C++ and like it quite a bit but if you want to use C# for games you might as well give Unity a try. I've only worked on small projects (and as a one man team that's all I really can do) but it's fun and powerful enough for everything I want it to do.

Any question about programming on/. is bound to start several arguments about which languages do what and blah blah blah.

To the OP, if not trolling, Pick a language, any language and just try making simple 2d games for awhile. Try recreating classic games like pong (very simple) to space invaders and tetris. You don't need to worry about engines or anything so much as the graphics are simple and the games themselves are easy to tweak and experiment with. Then once you have a